ELDRIDGE CLEAVER’S CODPIECE

(and other sidequests)

About

Note: I am not a historian. I accept all responsibility for factual errors. Even when this research appears reliable, treat it as nonauthoritative; always verify and corroborate independently.

Upon returning to the United States in 1975 after seven years in exile, his political and religious beliefs underwent many changes. As a born-again Christian, he became involved in the Unification Church and CARP. After leaving Sun Myung Moon's community, better known as the Moonies, he tried out Catholicism. When Catholicism no longer sufficed, in 1979, he formed his own revivalist ministry, the Eldridge Cleaver Crusades. He purchased 40 acres in the Nevada desert with plans to use it for his ministry's headquarters.

Eldridge Cleaver’s Codpiece is a media aggregator about Leroy Eldridge Cleaver’s (August 31, 1935 – May 1, 1998) 1975 sartorial debut.

Eldridge Cleaver’s Codpiece is a featured [Infodump] project on KJR Studios/Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s Gather & Disperse platform.

Gather & Disperse (G & D) is an ecosystem for Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s research and archival work. G & D includes special collections of “found” Black vernacular photographs and Black printed matter; research platforms on radical Black educational institutions and Black spiritual movements; infodumps on niche histories such as Eldridge Cleaver’s fashion line and the escape of Penelope the Platypus; and viewfinders that closely read shapes, textures, animals, and typography that we may typically overlook.

The [Infodump] cluster is driven by a visceral obsession (read more about (surrendering to) obsession here), hyperfixation, and the exhaustive encyclopedic pleasure of finding as much as I can about a niche history. Projects in the [Infodump] cluster are organized around three commitments.

Aggregation as Substrate: An aggregator gathers information from multiple sources and consolidates them into a single, publicly accessible, centralized platform. While the project prioritizes breadth over teleological narration, aggregation is an interpretive, thus subjective process. I seek meaning through accumulation. This accumulation serves as a substrate for future inquiry. I have included all available and accessible media and research materials to the greatest extent possible.
Invitation to Distributed Authorship: Distributed authorship emphasizes the importance of decentralized, multidirectional creation. Readers are encouraged to contribute more resources to expand the aggregator in expected and unexpected directions. We pursue the elastic limits of the niche, sometimes birthing adjacent and derivative aggregators that build “primitive hypertext” (Octavia Estelle Butler).
Obsessive Driver: The obsessive driver refers to the affective and somatic ambiance that sustains intensive attention. While this force relates to Derrida’s notion of archive fever, I am more interested in the literal dimensions of fever as sensory intensification. Early etymological roots suggest fever to mean “burn”, “to be restless”, and “intense nervous excitement”. Somatically registered, the obsessive driver - the fever - arouses as it compels enmeshment. These intense moments are markers of the understated, but very present relationships between deep feeling and deep research. Research, maybe activates a wider range of sensation.

But, Why?

I am interested in belief revision: what compels someone to be ardently drawn to a set of beliefs, and then to abandon or transform them over time? This project makes no claims to answer that question. Rather, it orbits the celebritification of political figures that contributes to public narratives that herald ideological consistency as the norm and desired state.

In pursuing this niche history, I challenge myself to locate a soft edge of political biography that invites encounter rather than resolution. Cleaver’s ideological shifts disrupt our expectations.

In learning about how his ideas plasticize, we might be better equipped to consider questions of allegiance, foreclosure, certainty, and accountability.